divide and rule on globalized scale

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Rene Abad

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Sep 1, 2011, 11:12:33 PM9/1/11

to Rene G. Abad

fyi -

if you're from a poor country, you can be recruited to fight u.s.'s
globalized war, same as poor u.s. citizens

like capampangans being used to capture aguinaldo, ilocano warriors
deployed in mindanao pacification, etc.

regards

rene

The Invisible Army
For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell.
by Sarah Stillman June 6, 2011

........................................
The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan
is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about
sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast
majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired
guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and
Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at
meagre chow halls, and host dance parties featuring Nepalese romance
ballads and Ugandan church songs. A large number are employed by
fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer
but who often operate outside the law.

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as
“third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having
been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to
sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude
by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos,
hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a
yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other
grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of
food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a
thousand workers.

Amid the slow withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,
T.C.N.s have become an integral part of the Obama Administration’s
long-term strategy, as a way of replacing American boots on the
ground. But top U.S. military officials are seeing the drawbacks to
this outsourcing bonanza. Some argue, as retired General Stanley
McChrystal did before his ouster from Afghanistan, last summer, that
the unregulated rise of the Pentagon’s Third World logistics army is
undermining American military objectives. Others worry that
mistreatment of foreign workers has become, as the former U.S.
Representative Christopher Shays, who co-chairs the bipartisan
Commission on Wartime Contracting, describes it, “a human-rights abuse
that cannot be tolerated.”

The extensive outsourcing of wartime logistics—first put to the test
during the Clinton Administration, in Somalia and the Balkans—was
designed to reduce costs while allowing military personnel to focus on
combat. In practice, though, military privatization has produced
convoluted chains of foreign subcontracts that often lead to cost
overruns and fraud. The Commission on Wartime Contracting recently
warned of the dangers associated with “poorly conceived, poorly
structured, poorly conducted, and poorly monitored subcontracting,”
particularly noting the military’s “heavy reliance on foreign
subcontractors who may not be accountable to any American governmental
authority.”
............................................................

For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_stillman?printable=true

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